Were you away for the weekend? Catch up on some big stories.
Frosty mornings should ease back to just chilly. Local weather coverage is online here.
Click to use an interactive map of house prices in Clark County.
In east Vancouver’s 98684 ZIP code, the median sales price of $247,500 in September remained just 10 percent below the $275,000 peak in August 2007. Farther east, Washougal’s 98671 ZIP code has seen one of the largest price drops. There, the September median sales price of $254,940 was a dismal 43 percent below the December 2006 peak of $450,000. (The Columbian’s analysis generally excluded rural areas because of their small number of home sales).
Those numbers are considered by many to be imperfect indicators of real estate values. They are influenced by seasonal variations, new housing construction that can elevate or lower prices of surrounding homes, and the number of home sales, among other factors. They are not adjusted for inflation. Nevertheless, the overall picture of housing prices tracking well below the peak of the last decade’s housing bubble resonates with many in the housing industry.
“I don’t find it surprising at all,” said Mike Lamb, a veteran real estate broker at Windermere Stellar Vancouver who regularly tracks local housing trends. With such a huge drop in sales prices, Lamb said, full recovery is a long-term endeavor.
“We’re continuing to see (housing price) appreciation,” he said. “I don’t see anything to suggest that it isn’t going to continue.”
Many brokers, such as Patrick Ginn with Vancouver’s Ginn Realty Group, take the delayed recovery in home prices as a sign of a more stable, realistic market.
“The decline was so dramatic and significant, I don’t think it would be healthy to see it go back up as quick as it went down,” Ginn said. “So, what we’re seeing is a much more cautious buyer, much more cautious lenders, much more cautious appraisers.”
- Read the complete story here.
When a representative of the National Institute of Corrections visited the Clark County Jail over the summer, she found a detox center in disarray, housing units teeming with inmates, and a facility buckling under the pressure of overcrowding and a lack of direct supervision of inmates.
Her report, released in August, highlights the growing challenges facing the jail and its roughly 700 inmates. There are a plethora of unmet needs, even as the jail has taken strides to improve services. At the center of it all, the report concludes, mentally ill inmates don’t receive the attention they should.
“Three housing units undergoing renovations in the Main Jail are not currently used,” wrote Margaret Severson, a technical resource provider for the institute of corrections, “which contributes to a logjam of people — particularly those who are assessed as being at risk for suicide and who have mental illness — in other units.”
According to the report, the jail is antiquated in its design, and measures should be taken to bring it in line with current jail trends. Among the top trends is being able to directly monitor inmates, a difficult feat to accomplish at the jail, which is replete with blind spots. The concerns raised in the report are plenty, and they echo what local mental health advocates have long said. But amid the critical look at the jail, there’s the thought that the future will be a bit brighter.
The report came at the recommendation of Chief Jail Deputy Ric Bishop and Sheriff Garry Lucas and is being used as a road map for the sorts of changes the jail staff plans to implement next year. For years, the jail has been overcrowded. What was designed to house 306 inmates in 1984 currently has twice that number.
It’s time for change, Bishop said.
“You have people’s safety at stake — everyone’s safety,” Bishop said. “So you have to move quickly.”
- Read the complete story here.
Catch your breath and look around. The view is incredible.
That was the finding of one of the more unlikely groups of adventurers to cruise the tree canopy — ladies of a certain age who live at Highgate Senior Living in Hazel Dell. Just before summer turned to autumn, a caravan of vehicles ventured from Highgate out to Tree to Tree Aerial Adventure Park, about an hour west of Portland in Gaston, Ore., so they could cross one thrill off a collective bucket list: spending a day zip lining across the sky, just like the young folks do.
“It was the best day of my life!” declared Toni Gerbracht, 89, a native of the Netherlands, after her feet were back on terra firma. “So exciting! It is awesome!” (And zip lining wasn’t on her personal list, she added with a chuckle: “Not for me. I was scared to death.”)
Soaring through the treetops was a blast for these adventurers. But an equal joy was simply being together and getting away on a fresh cool morning, they agreed. Some were happiest during the van ride, marvelling at new vineyards and old forests and sharing memories of traveling, homemaking and loving life in the lush Willamette Valley. Bucketsful of yearning and ambition are fine, but the real key to life is enjoying the present, they said — and proved.
Which got us wondering: What about bucket-list items that aren’t physical thrills and chills? Were there quieter, more personal, more telling wishes that wouldn’t necessarily generate whoops and screams? We asked our readers to peer into their buckets and tell us what they saw.
- Read the complete story here.
Bud Van Cleve, an inexhaustible community activist whose efforts over the last couple of decades earned him the nickname “Mayor of Hazel Dell,” died on Nov. 5 at age 84.
Despite declining health for the last few years, the man of a million meetings was still attending them regularly, according to his wife of 44 years. Sherry Van Cleve said Bud’s death from a hemorrhagic stroke was “totally unexpected. He’d had a great week. He’d been to meetings. He went out with his daughter. The night before he died he wanted to hear all the election results.”
“He was still involved in everything,” Sherry said. “He was still president of the Northeast Hazel Dell Neighborhood Association. He was working on the annual Christmas party — that was his baby. He started it with money out of his own pocket, 17 years ago.”
The welfare of needy children and families was her husband’s real passion in life, Sherry said. That’s because Ballard Eugene Van Cleve grew up “impoverished” in Arkansas, she said.
Upon his retirement in 1994, he began investigating and troubleshooting issues in his “hometown,” Hazel Dell — which isn’t a town at all but a network of neighborhoods just north of the city of Vancouver.
“If God made a prettier place,” he thought about Hazel Dell, “he kept it to himself.” Once Van Cleve came off the road after all those years, he told The Columbian, “I came to the conclusion that I didn’t know anybody in my hometown. I knew more people in Denver or Anchorage than I knew right here.”
He remedied that in a big way. Van Cleve started getting elected president of the Northeast Hazel Dell Neighborhood Association in 1999, and just never stopped. According to a statement from Clark County, his record of service included “more than 60 local boards, committees, councils and organizations working on topics ranging from access to public places for people with disabilities, land use planning, the 78th Street Heritage Farm, and parks.” He was also an “early and active advocate” for the county’s Juvenile Restorative Justice Program, which holds young offenders accountable and gives them opportunities for “positive personal change.”
His favorite motto: “You don’t have to move to live in a better neighborhood.”
All of which led The Columbian in 2006 to ask him the obvious question: Didn’t he want to run for higher elected office than neighborhood association board?
“Oh God no,” he said. “I have no interest in politics.”
- Read the complete story here.
The region’s newest state representative said politics was never part of her plan.
But in many ways, in an election cycle when conservative Republicans made big gains, Lynda Wilson could not have charted a better course to Olympia.
President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 galvanized Wilson and turned her from someone who watched political news and “yelled at the TV, like you do in football” to someone who decided to “get on the field and try and make a change.”
She became the chairwoman of “We the People,” a group many considered to have Tea Party leanings.
“We never described ourselves as Tea Party. We didn’t have any money. … We were interested in learning more about the Constitution,” Wilson said about the group.
She started attending commission and city council meetings; she would testify in Olympia on behalf of the National Federation of Independent Business and landed on the government affairs committee for the Association of Washington Business.
Wilson became a vocal gun-rights advocate, pushing Vancouver Public Schools to allow teachers to carry firearms and replace “gun-free zones” signs in schools with “protected by armed personnel.”
And she was elected to chair the Clark County GOP at a time when party leadership shifted philosophically more to the right.
Wilson is reluctant to outline any grand policy proposals so soon after the election, but it seems that the principles that have dictated much of her life will remain at the forefront as she heads to the statehouse:; less government, no new taxes, protect small businesses.
- Read the complete story here.
Two years after shocking Clark County’s political world with his early exit from the Legislature, former state senator Joe Zarelli is making a surprising foray into the recreational marijuana industry.
In 2012, Zarelli’s 17th year as a lawmaker, the Ridgefield Republican had firmly cemented his place among the leaders of the Senate. By then, he’d already spent nearly a decade as the party’s principal budget architect. Then, that spring, Zarelli astonished friends and foes alike by abruptly resigning in the middle of his term to pursue a different, unspecified career.
Shortly after, he quietly began forging a new life by building EcoGrow Lighting, a subsidiary of Camas-based EcoSafe Technologies, a consultant for energy-efficient lighting design in public and private sector offices. EcoGrow manufactures colorful LED grow lights for a variety of indoor farmers. And Zarelli, who sees recreational marijuana producers as the company’s key growth sector in the coming years, plans to expand sales of his products throughout Washington, Oregon and Alaska.
Few would have predicted Zarelli’s new life as EcoGrow’s managing director after he initially opposed recreational marijuana. But two years after voting against Initiative 502, Zarelli said he’s impressed with the marijuana business community.
“What I’m seeing is actually a cleaner system, where the people that are getting into it tend to be business-minded,” he said. “I mean, it’s legal. It’s no different than a pharmacist who sells drugs over the counter in my mind now.”
- Read the complete story here.
